POP TO POPISM (2014): The cultural shift in contemporary art

Graham Reid | Dec 24, 2014 | 4 min read

In the early Sixties just before the
Beatles conquered America through a combination of art, smarts and
image – and shifted the coordinates of popular culture to Britain –
America was the nexus of global pop culture and political life.

The Kennedys, Hollywood, consumerism,
girl groups, John Wayne, Marilyn Monroe . . . . The world had been
electrified by Elvis and rock'n'roll in the Fifties, and Disney-fied in
Technicolor and Cinerama. In these volatile times of Mao in China and
Castro in Cuba and the bitter chill of the Cold War, New York was the
new Paris, and California the automobile-dependent dream state of
optimism and hard edges under the bright sun.

Is it any wonder that American artists
– and those who had grown up with this globalised American
iconography – were drawn to these images and the emergent Pop Art
movement – which has begun in the mid Fifties – suddenly became the
dominant art trend.

A reading of the expansive Pop To
Popism at the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (which runs
until March 1) confirms the global impact of Pop Art in over 200
works, mostly by big ticket Americans but significant space given
over to European and Australian artists. It provide an insight into
how artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein and Robert
Rauschenberg reduced, refined and codified American imagery.

These many artists recalibrated
sometimes low culture into high art: “Marilyn Monroe's in
everything,” said an exasperated school student during my recent
visit.

Not quite true. But Marilyn, Jackie and
Elvis (in Warhols), as well as John Wayne (in Marisol's famous
sculpture) and Disney figures are as prominent images as pictures
collaged from pulp sci-fi and movie magazines (in Scottish-born
artist Eduardo Paolozzi's work from the late 50s) and consumer goods
like Warhol's 10 screenprints of Campbell's soup cans and Heinz
Tomato Ketchup boxes.

In the deconstruction and
reconstituting of American imagery, all these disparate elements
co-exist within the same space, drawn into a movement by the
critical, ironic or satirical comment which the artists bring to
bear.

Tom Wesselmann's massive collage and
oil Still Life #29 from 1963 (a key year given the sheer
number of works so dated) is a bright collision of consumer-driven
modernity (a VW Beetle in one corner) and the traditional (the
enormous still life of fruit which occupies two thirds of the
canvas). It stands as an emblem of how Pop Art also ushered in
post-modernism in its appropriating of images.

Numerous big names are represented in
this enormous exhibition – Richard Hamilton, David Hockney, Cindy
Sherman, James Rosenquist, Jasper Johns, Gilbert and George, Patrick
Caulfield and Robert Indiana among them – but some of the less
familiar artists and works are perhaps more of a revelation.

Martha Rosler's photomontages from '67-72 use images from the Vietnam frontlines taken from the pages of
Life and slips them them
into domestic settings.

The war is now just outside the suburban
window or inside the tidy room as a distraught Vietnamese woman
carried a dead baby up the stairs.

These are powerful images, perhaps more
so today as the bloody brutalities of war are edited out or come with
“viewers are warned some images may be disturbing”.

So not everything in Pop To Popism
elicits a smile for using pages from Popular Mechanics, photos
of Charles Atlas and multiples of consumer goods or Jackie's face.

There is cutting social critique here
too as in Warhol's insipidly green and uneasy screenprint of an
electric chair (from '67), Hockney's disturbing bleak figures in The
Second Marriage ('63) and the Australian Brett Whitely's The
American Dream ('68-69) which is a room-filling series of panels
he created in New York at the height of the Vietnam war and from the
depths of drink and drugs.

The whole exhibition is divided into
interesting but interconnected subsets: The Future is Now; Swinging
London; The American Dream; Euro Pop, Made in Oz, Late Pop and Popism
(the latter looking at work from the 80s and including Jean-Michel
Basquiat, the Australian Howard Arkley, Keith Haring and others).

The Made in Oz gallery is immediately
striking for the vivid colours deployed by many artists (that hard
Australian light?), the proto-feminist and sexually-charged work of
Vivienne Binns from 67 (Vag Dens is a vagina with incisors)
and a series of intricate screenprints on silver and gold foil (Bob
Dylan in Mr Tambourine Man) by the late Martin Sharp, perhaps
best known for the album covers he did for Cream in this period,
Disraeli Gears and Wheels of Fire.

His large
multi-colour splattered enamel image of Jimi Hendrix ('71) is
wonderfully energetic and suitably psychedelic.

There is also the rage of Mike Brown's
Hallelujah! collage (65) which is littered with provocative
obscenities and the very Australian “bloody stuffit upya”. The
provocation worked and he was sentences to three months hard labour
for obscenity (although this was reduced on appeal to a $20 fine
although the conviction was upheld).

At the time of writing no one it seems
has complained about his Big Mess next to it from the same
period which has “Fuck the bloody Pope” quite prominent.

Times change as do our sensitivities,
although in Icelandic artist Erro's Pop History (67) – which
cleverly appropriates images from Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg,
Rosenquist and others – his caricatures of Russians as crazed
Cossacks do come perilously close to how Nazi propaganda portrayed
Jews. But in much brighter colours, of course.

And New Zealand-born Colin Lanceley and
Ross Crothall are here too, part of the short-lived Annandale
Imitation Realist Group with Brown.

Pop Art – the movement which
repositioned the commonplace, the ordinary and popular culture into
the forefront of American and then international art – changed our
world and still challenges us, especially a Chinese tour group which
stood bewildered by Warhol's soup can screenprints.

Without Pop Art we probably wouldn't
see graphic novels essayed in the New York Review of Books,
Arnold Schwarzenegger might never have been governor of California,
there would be no Obama “Hope” posters by Shepard Fairey.

There probably wouldn't have been New
Journalism, no columnists writing about their own lives rather than
the workings of political or economic elite and none of those
Lichtenstein-style cartoon ads on Auckland's buses.

As an exhibition Pop To Popism
– which run from the amusing and entertaining to the provocative
and gripping -- makes you think, “Whaam!”

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